Googoogjoob > Recent Status Updates

Two chapters in and my main impression of this book so far is that it has some of the clunkiest writing I've ever encountered in a text of this (ostensible) caliber. The first chapter opens with "Turcoman" used as a plural (instead of "Turcomen" or "Turcomans"), "Ilkhanate Khanate," and several rather tortured sentences too long to quote in this little update.

Taking a while with this one not because it's exceptionally long (it isn't) but because the text is very dense, in a way I did not at all expect based on the Pratt I've read previously (clear, journalistic nonfiction). Unusual words, imagined dialects, lots of imagined history and politics which are left for the reader to deduce.

I'm considering just dropping this book. It's taken me so long to get this far. Hourani is so dull as a writer- this is an abstracted, generalized history rather than a narrative history, but even the most abstract historians tend to have a storytelling impulse that leads them to drop in illustrative or entertaining anecdotes. Hourani doesn't have that. He just drones on and on.

I'm not really enjoying this book, and my progress in it has thus slowed to a crawl. It's overstuffed. It frankly should've just been a straight dual TR/Taft bio, if not just a straight TR bio. It feels like I've read the front halves of five different books so far.

Not going so fast through this one either. I think there's a mismatch between Lewis's style- the meticulous bard of American mediocrity- and the subject matter- the high-stakes world of medical research, where genuine heroism can and does happen.

Slow going. This book is, frankly, overstuffed. I'm 156 pages in and, contra the title, it's only just getting to the journalism stuff, after extensive coverage of the pre-Progressive Era lives and careers of Roosevelt and Taft. It feels like this should've been a straight dual bio.

Slow going in a dense book.